Re:voir Collection
/GME presents key works published by RE:VOIR, a label that publishes and distributes classic and contemporary experimental cinema including films from the Dadaist, Surrealist and Letterist movements, films from the American avant-garde, diary films, arthouse features, animated works and hand-painted films.
RE:VOIR is devoted to giving a wider audience access to a relatively unknown yet rich and diverse body of cinema, and to disseminating the major works of experimental film at the highest possible quality. Each release receives rigorous attention and extensive preparation, and yields an object of enduring integrity and quality for collection, discovery, and reflection.
FEATURED NEW RELEASES FROM RE:VOIR
3 JOURNEYS TO LITHUANIA
REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA - Jonas Mekas, 1972, 16mm, 82 min, GOING HOME - Adolfas Mekas, 16mm, 1971, 60 min, and JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA - Pola Chapelle, 8mm, 1971, 102 min
Adolfas and Jonas Mekas arrived in New York in 1949, leaving their native land, Lithuania, behind, caught between Nazi and Soviet occupation. Little by little the camera became their means of expression and cinema invaded their lives. 27 years passed before they could finally return to Lithuania. This is the odyssey the three films intertwiningly recall: Adolfas and Jonas Mekas and Pola Chapelle (Adolfas'ʼwife) are at once actor and filmer. The Mekas brothers rediscover their country and family with their changes, while Pola Chapelle is the external gaze embracing this reunion. Neither Lithuanian nor New Yorkers, where is their home now? As Jonas likes to say “My Country is Cinema.”
Films by Robert Kramer
THE EDGE - 1967, 35mm, 101 min
THE EDGE (1967) and ICE (1969) form a definitive diptych on the temptations of terrorism and insurrection: a man wants to assassinate the President of the United States (THE EDGE); revolutionary groups launch a major armed offensive against the ruling regime (ICE). However, both fictions are less interested in the impact of activism than in the moral state of shock that gradually shifts relationships and beliefs as it overlays another sense of time and other types of logic on those of revolutionary efficiency. Made in parallel with Robert Kramer’s own militant activism in Newsreel and other organizations of the American left, which they contradict dialectically, they are an extraordinary application of filmmaking considered as a tool of thought in motion.
ICE - 1969, 16mm, 133 min
“I think that now, based on a lot of ICE’s contradictions – between men and women, between ‘activism’ and ‘living,’ between life and death – I think that now, we are starting to understand the synthesis, or at least the very diverse forms of synthesis that will help us create a higher, clearer level of consciousness, and therefore a higher level of activism.” (Robert Kramer)
GUNS - 1980, 35mm, 90 min (plus bonus features NAISSANCE, 1981, and LA PEUR, 1983)
Following a series of films questioning commitment and politics in America and culminating with Milestones 1975, and a 1977 documentary on Lisbon’s Carnation Revolution, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal, Robert Kramer moved to France with his family. The first film he made there was Guns, an intricate feature which echoed the paranoid films of 1970’s Hollywood. With Guns, Kramer continues his exploration of the militant psyche, while at the same time experimenting with different forms of narration.
IN THE COUNTRY - 1966, 16mm, 62 min (plus bonus features VIDEOLETTERS 1992, and TROUBLEMAKERS, 1965)
In the United States in 1966, Robert Kramer directed his first feature film, IN THE COUNTRY, outside all existing production systems and with the political fellow travelers who had just filmed him in the documentary TROUBLEMAKERS. IN THE COUNTRY shows what is left out of TROUBLEMAKERS: the documentary shows actions (community organizing, militant activism) that the fictional film keeps outside the frame in order to focus on a relationship crisis in which the man fails to put aside, for a few days, his obsessive political activism. Twenty-five years later, the VIDEOLETTERS exchanged with Stephen Dwoskin recreate as in an open mosaic this melancholic and lyrical treatment of separation.
JACKIE RAYNAL - HOTEL NEW YORK
HOTEL NEW YORK - 1984, 16mm, 52 min and NEW YORK STORIES - 1980, 16mm, 27 min
“One day in New York, I took my linen to a small Chinese laundry. Then I forgot it for a few weeks. When I went back, the laundry wasn’t there anymore, the building had been demolished! I was haunted by the thought of my bedsheets gone forever with the laundry. This experience was the starting point for the New York Hotel script. I wanted to write and make this film to show how everything is transient over there. Things change all the time and are immediately replaced, much quicker than in Europe. The story stemmed from my own experience and impressions as a foreigner. It’s a comedy-drama.”
-Jackie Raynal, Libération
“Raynal shows a New York... that usually never gets on the screen, and the storytelling is so swift, so pared down, and economical that Raynal can pack more into one hour than many filmmakers can into two.”
-Filmex, LA Weekly
BORIS LEHMAN - MAGNUM BEGYNASIUM BRUXELLENSE
MAGNUM BEGYNASIUM BRUXELLENSE - 1978, 16mm, 145 min
¨A living chronicle of the residents of the Béguinage neighborhood – so named because it is situated on the site of the former Brussels béguinage. Designed as an encyclopaedic inventory, the film comprises around thirty chapters, each imbricated with the other, like so many pieces of a puzzle, or resembling a termite mound with many intersecting galleries. It takes place within the space and interstices of a day, starting at dawn and ending at night.¨
- Boris Lehman
The following RE:VOIR titles, including more than half a dozen titles by Philippe Garrel, are available from GME as downloadable DSL .mp4 files and on disk. Specific pricing and details about each publication can be clicked through to from the linked titles listed below (note Zanzibar titles at end of list).
Titles published by RE:VOIR
Titles in the Zanzibar Film Series: